Thomas Merton's Preface to The Wisdom of the Desert

Thomas
Merton published The
Wisdom of the Desert
in 1960, his
contribution to short works collecting favorite sayings of the
Christian
desert hermits, or Desert Fathers. While the selecting was doubtless an
enjoyable task,
the Preface to the little ensemble surprisingly emerges as a
clear,
precise and useful introduction to eremitism as a whole.

Merton
begins his introduction by asking what the hermits sought in going to
the desert, in abandoning the cities for solitude. In a
word, "salvation," he says. But Merton carefully notes that
abandoning the cities was not
only abandoning the pagan character of urban life but also abandoning
their presumeably increasing Christian presence, "when the 'world'
became unofficially Christian." Merton notes that

these men seem
to have thought ... that there is really no such thing as a "Christian
state." They seem to have doubted that Christianity and politics could
ever be mixed to such an extent as to produce a fully Christian society
... for ... the only Christian society was spiritual and extramundane.

Merton
argues that these hermits were ahead of their time, not behind it, that
they understood what was necessary -- and unnecessary -- for
establishing a new society. The line of Merton's thought may show its
age in Merton's
vocabulary, describing the hermits as the new "axial" men, as
"personalists" --
but the point is important. The hermits were not pragmatic or negative
individualists, not even rebels against society. They might be seen as
"anarchists," -- and "it will do no harm to think of them in that
light."
They simply believed that their values were sufficient for ruling
themselves, and for providing for humane fellowship. While
acknowledging the titular authority of bishops, these were "far away"
and had little to say about the desert for at least a century.

The
hermits sought their own self, rejecting the false self "fabricated
under social compulsion in 'the world.'" They accepted dogmatic
formulas
of the Christian faith, but without controversy, in their simplest and
most elemental forms. But while the monks or cenobites living in nearby
monasteries also conceived of formulas as necessary scaffolding to
their spiritual growth, the hermits were entirely free to conform only
to the "secret, hidden, inscrutable will of God which might differ very
notably from one cell to another!" Merton quotes an early saying of St.
Anthony: "Whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do
that thing, and you shall keep your heart safe."

But the quote refers specifically to the perogative of the
hermit, to one

who
was very alert and very sensitive to the landmarks of a trackless
wilderness. The hermit had to be a man mature in faith, humble and
detached from himself to a degree that is altogether terrible.

None other than the hermit could abide within these apparent
extremes. Hence the prescribed maturity.

He could not afford to be an
illuminist. He could not dare risk attachment to his own ego, or the
dangerous ecstacy of self-will. He could not retain the slightest
identification with his superficial, transient, self-constructed self.

The hermit, above any other person, had to lose himself to a
transcendent and mysterious yet inner reality. To Merton this reality
was Christ. Clearly, this Christ was not the popularized image of icons
and evocations but a transcendent being dissolved from society and
convention. How, then, could the hermit not lead a life of simplicity,
compunction, solitude, labor, poverty, charity, purity of heart? The
fruit of this self-discipline was quies,
"rest." This "rest" the world --
meaning society -- could not offer.

Merton notes that the desert hermits never spoke of this
quies,
never distinguished it from their way of life. They did not
theorize, philosophize, or theologize. "In many respects, therefore,"
declares Merton rightly, "these Desert Fathers had much in common with
Indian Yogis and with Zen Buddhist monks of China and Japan."

As is well known to those familiar with his biogrphy,
Merton always chafed with his own monasteric life -- cenobitism --
while fulfilling a grand
service to his readers by writing, a privilege that monastic life
afforded
him, or rather was afforded to him by his abbots. But he never shrunk
from criticizing his
contemporaries. Thus Merton states that men like the desert hermits
don't
exist in monasteries. Though monks leave the society of "the world,"
they
conform to the society into which they enter, with its own norms and
conventions, rules and penalties. While many desert hermits were once
monks, they left monastic
society and established a new path of "fabulous originality," to which
nothing contemporary in Christianity can compare.

The desert hermits

neither courted the approval
of their
contemporaries nor sought to provoke their disapproval, because the
opinions of others had ceased, for them, to be matters of importance.
They had no set doctrine about freedom, but they had in fact become
free by paying the price of freedom.

This price was the experience of solitude and simplicity. The
words and sayings of the desert fathers are a prompt to reflection, but
it was the lived
experience of solitude that truly counted for them. Hence their sayings
are plain,
pithy, and trenchant, born of the experience of solitude and wrestling
with the ego. Merton affirms their "existential quality." The hermits
were humble and silent, with not much to say, which makes reading them
refreshing. The secrets to their lives are thus revealed directly in
their manner
of living, expressed in it, and therefore deducible indirectly
from their sayings.

Today (as much as in the past), the desert
hermits are too often portrayed as ascetic fanatics. This is entirely
the conclusion of one who has not read their sayings and tried to
penetrate their values. In fact, the hermits strike the careful reader
as
"humble, quiet, sensible people, with a deep knowledge of human
nature." Their world seethed in controversy but they "kept their mouths
shut" -- not because they were ignorant or opinionless but because they
became like the desert, offering nothing to the worldly but "discreet
and detached silence."

Merton notes that the desert hermits were mostly "on their
way" and not boasters of arrival. They were not passionless, bloodless,
or "beyond all temptation." This is what makes their sayings and their
way of
life so compelling. The were laborers, and showed genuine concern for
the welfare of their fellows in charity, exhibiting the ideal virtue of
Christianity.

Isolation in the self,
inability to go out of oneself to others, would mean incapacity for any
form of self-transcedence. To be thus the prisoner of one's own
selfhood is, in fact, to be in hell: a truth that Sartre, though
professing himself an atheist, has expressed in the most arresting
fashin in his play No
Exit (Huis Clos).

Ultimately, charity is love, and holds the primacy over
everything else in the spiritual life. Love in fact is the spiritual
life, avers Merton, meaning not sentiment, nor mere almsgiving, nor
mere identification with one's brothers and sisters because they are
like oneself. Love here presents itself in all humility and with
reverence toward the other and the other's integrity, identifying with
that which is transcendent in both oneself and another. Love presumes a
death of ego in order to accommodate the needs of charity and of
others. The work of the hermits, which is the spiritual life, can
accommodate the needs of others in this way, looking to the
shortcomings of self always, and taking up the proscription of Jesus to
judge no one. In this one is free, free to pursue one's own path
without obligation.

By the end of the 5th century, the monasteries of Scete and
Nitria, so close to the desert, had become "the world." Merton notes
how they had virtually become cities, with laws and penalties.
"Three whips hung
from a palm tree outside the church of Scete: one to punish delinquent
monks, one to punish thieves, and one for vagrants." To this the desert
hermits would profoundly demur. Thehermits represented the "primitive
anarchic desert ideal." And in the desert, in solitude, all
transgressions eventually serve to enlighten the wayward soul.

Merton completes his preface with a sketch of some
important names now familiar to the reader of the sayings: Arsenius,
Moses, Anthony, Paphnutius, Pastor, John the Dwarf. Merton's book is
brief
but invaluable as a start, and worth revisiting for the familiar.

Merton concludes with a telling
paragraph that is every bit as relevant today as when he wrote it in
1960:

It would perhaps be too much
to say that the world needs another movement such as that which drew
these men into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine. Ours is certainly a
time for solitaries and for hermits. But merely to reproduce the
simplicity, austerity and prayer of these primitive souls is not a
complete or satisfactory answer. We must transcend them, and transcend
all those who, since their time, have gone beyond the limits which they
set. We must liberate ourselves, in our own way, from involvement
in a world that is plunging to disaster. But our world is different
from theirs. Our involvement in it is more complete. Our danger is far
more desperate. Our time, perhaps, is shorter than we think.

¶

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Thomas Merton's The
Wisdom of the Desert is published by New
Directions (New York, 1960), Sheldon (London, 1974), and Shambhala
(Boston, 1994 and reprinted 2004).